Wednesday, May 25, 2011

It's finally time to plant some corn!

It's taken a while, but we're finally making some progress in the corn fields. We're only planting 45 acres of silage corn this year, but all of it will be in my great-uncle's fields in the Yellow Creek Bottom. Even though there hasn't been much rain in May, the land is just now dry enough to begin working. As my great-uncle said to me yesterday, "It's as dry as it has been since last fall...and it still ain't that dry."

making the "1st cut" with the disk in the bottom

We moved two disks down there on Monday morning and spent the day turning the soil and cutting up the weeds and grass. This paved the way for the local co-op to spread fertilizer on it yesterday, save for one 2-acre spot that was too wet for the spreader truck to drive over. One of our employees started "cutting in" the fertilizer and smoothing the ground with the disk (we attached a heavy drag behind it) mid-afternoon. I decided to run the disk for a couple of hours following my son's tee-ball game last night, and was able to operate until well-past dark thanks to GPS and some fairly good working lights on the tractor.

disking at night by GPS & worklights

So that brings us to today. I'm about to head back to the field and resume the disking, which hopefully will be finished by early afternoon. Dad will be in the field with the planter by mid-morning, and I'll probably take over that job around lunchtime and run while he milks this afternoon. We expect planting to take 12 hours, so we'll probably each take an evening shift until we finish the job. With rain in the forecast tomorrow, it's imperative that we finish sometime tonight. If all goes well today (knock on wood), we'll be able to start turning our attention to something else tomorrow.

2 comments:

We finished our 1800 acres of corn and beans last night with the last of the beans in the ground. Not a moment too soon with all the storms coming through. Getting slammed today too. Many Hoosier farmers are not even half way done with planting, and there are some who have yet to find a dry enough piece of ground to start. It's going to be interesting!